New Star Wars logo and concept art unveiled

Check out the typography and artwork for Disney’s new Star Wars TV series, Star Wars Rebels.

Disney has revealed logo and concept art for its first major Star Wars offering – a new animated TV series, Star Wars Rebels, that will premiere in Autumn 2014.

The previous animated series, Clone Wars, took the Star Wars universe in a radically different direction artistically, with the look of Japanese Manga. This new artwork, however, brings the forthcoming TV series more in line with the visuals of the original trilogy.

Worn look

The colour palette of the Rebel Alliance is brought to the fore in the logo design, and with a worn look that’s more in keeping with both the grittier feel of Episode IV: A New Hope and recent trends in sci-fi movie logos.

That carries through to the concept art, which is explictly inspired by the original Episode IV concept art of Ralph McQuarrie. In fact, a set of digital brushes has been developed so that artists working on the show can closely match the style of McQuarrie.

This new ship in the Rebel fleet called ‘The Ghost’ is described as a cross between a B-17 and the Millennium Falcon

Presenting the artwork to Star Wars Celebration Europe, The supervising director of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Dave Filoni, also namechecked Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki as an influence on the character design.

The artwork for the new series will be explicitly based on the designs for the original 70s Star Wars movie

Star Wars Rebels will be set in a time just before Episode IV, and can only raise excitement levels for the release of the new Star Wars sequel, Episode VII, in summer 2015.